South King County Homes Gaining Value Fastest

As promised last week, it’s time to take an updated look at how King County’s sales are shifting between the different regions around the county, since geographic shifts can and do affect the median price.

First up, let’s have a look at each region’s (approximate) median price (actually the median of the medians for each area within the region).

The low end regions are gaining the most lately, up 19.8% year-over-year and 6.7% month-over-month. The middle tier was up 17.4% YOY and 3.3% MOM, while the high tier gained 5.2% YOY and 0.9% MOM.

Next up, the percentage of each month’s closed sales that took place in each of the three regions. The dotted line is a four-month rolling average.

The share of sales that are taking place in the cheapest parts of the county has been falling fast over the last few months, down from 34.7% in April to 31.3% in June. This goes a long way toward explaining why the median price has shot up so much over the last few months.

As of June 2013, 31.3% of sales were in the low end regions, 35.2% in the mid range, and 33.5% in the high end. A year ago the low end regions had less of the share and the high end more: In June 2012 the low end made up 29.8% of the sales, the mid range was 35.1%, and the high end was 35.1%.

Here’s that information in a visual format:

Finally, here’s an updated look at the percentage of sales data all the way back through 2000:

There haven’t been many times since 2000 that the middle tier has had the most sales, and even fewer times that the low tier has simultaneously had the least sales. We’re definitely still in an odd market right now.

Share:

About The Tim

Tim Ellis is the founder of Seattle Bubble. His background in engineering and computer / internet technology, a fondness of data-based analysis of problems, and an addiction to spreadsheets all influence his perspective on the Seattle-area real estate market.

Yawn. Meanwhile the U.S. stock market reaches yet another record high as Americans wake up to the realization that Bernanke will never stop printing money.

U.S. Q2 GDP hits stall speed of less than 1%. Retail sales report is horrific. Stock market goes crazy with realization that this means more printing to follow. Stock market and housing bubbles begin to form a mini base. Investors go all in with hopes that the economy never recovers and the Fed prints forever.

In other news, the U.S. adds 200K jobs per month while the GDP print comes in below 1%. Of course, this is impossible and means the numbers are being fudged, but who cares as long as Ben keeps printing money?

Oh, that’s right. The old retired folks with their money under their mattresses are getting their arses handed to them. Would you like some food stamps to go with your walking cane mam?

RE:Jonness @ 4 –
I’m pleasantly surprised to see this progressive thinking coming from you. I did have you pinned as someone stuck in the old mentality based on some of your previous comments. Good job changing your approach to adapt to change. This is a sign of intelligence.

RE:Jonness @ 4 –
I’m pleasantly surprised to see this progressive thinking coming from you. I did have you pinned as someone stuck in the old mentality based on some of your previous comments. Good job changing your approach to adapt to change. This is a sign of intelligence.

Erik, sorry, but you’re making this site’s comment sections intolerable for me. Time for me to leave.

All — thanks for the good (and bad) discussions over the past few years!

RE:Kilen @ 9 –
We got rid of Kary too cause he couldn’t handle the stress. Only the strong survive on this site.

This site is for people that can see different views. If you can’t handle a different perspective, it is time for you to leave.
“We” didn’t get rid of Kary. A limit was placed on the number of comments we were allowed to make, and Kary chose not to participate in that.
Bye now and good luck.

RE:Ira Sacharoff @ 12 –
You are right. I was trying to support my comment about “Only the strong survive.” Kary left because of the comment limitation, but I think it was an addiction that was taking all his time and he knew he needed to stop. Kilen quit because he couldn’t handle other people’s opinion. Some people like one answer and cannot understand multiple approaches to the same problem.

I work with engineers all day and a lot of them have this problem. They are good at hammering out the details, but once things become subjective they freak out. People are smart in different ways. Kilen is like this and cannot handle multiple approaches to the same problem, so he freaked out at me and left. :-)

Ok, I’m waiting to go pick up some pavers for our next project so I have a few minutes, and comments to waste on this thread.

I think we have all been really nice to you. We’ve given you all the time in the world for you to make your case that your condo should double in price, and some one, any one, will pay you your asking price as soon as you can get past the capital gains waiting period for your primary residence deduction.

We get it, we heard it. You short sold your last place, now want to get double your purchase price.

We get it.

What I don’t get is that you want everyone to agree with you.

Kilen makes few comments, but has been here a long time. He’s simply expressing what I think you keep referring to as the Goon Squad mentality.

RE:David Losh @ 14 –
I do pay attention to everyone on here. In the beginning, I tried to ask questions and get feedback. Everyone ignored me, so I started making comments based on my viewpoints. I started getting feedback… some negative and some positive. I have learned a lot more this way. When I see something that doesn’t make sense to me, I give my perspective. Some people think i’m an idiot, and yes I am wrong sometimes. If I hear good reasoning, I change my perspective. I followed your whole gold theory, but I don’t agree. It has gone down, but I don’t see it being a great investment… again I could be wrong.

I use to read all your comments, but you were very rude to me which is fine as long as you are insightful and consistent. Then I noticed you were saying one thing and then contradicting yourself later, so I stopped reading your comments. Maybe you just were confused for a while cause your comments use to be better when I first started reading.

Goon squad mentality is the term used for the group of people that comment and beat others down when they have opposing views and never give an explanation or reasoning behind it. They just do a goon squad bash. When you ask them why or try to figure out where they are coming from, they do not reply. They down vote and call me dumb.

Gold is up. I hadn’t followed gold for years until the gold bugs here, and on other blogs insisted I pay attention. Gold dropped, below $1250, as some one said it would, and is now at $1289.

I paid attention to a new idea.

There are a lot of ideas here.

What had you confused was that we inherited the family home which is now on the market. My family has had many discussions about how to best present the property, and it is a struggle.

So, like many times it was discussed here briefly, and you got confused.

The other thing that I think may also be confusing you is that I sell my properties for a profit.

My primary residence was underwater after we extracted as much as we could get out of it. I’m one of the villains in the housing crisis for using my home as an ATM. However, like you, my sales data has me back above water, to a point that with a little work I might, just might get a little bit more out of this piece of poop, and out from under a mortgage.

So things progress, circumstances change, and you should be paying more attention to others, I think.

RE:Ira Sacharoff @ 11 – A friend of mine bought a condo in Kent in 2006 with 50% down. When he moved in with his girlfriend he couldn’t rent it out to cover the mortgage. The current situation is certainly more sustainable, but everyone I know that bought down there during the bubble has left for one reason or another. So many people walked away from their homes rather than hang on. I’m sure some of them had no choice, but even people who could have stayed decided to leave.

Given the high number of short sales still being listed, a lot of people that somehow managed to hang on through the great recession are now leaving. It can’t be a total coincidence that so many homeowners in SKC have thrown in the towel and moved on. That trend is hard to ignore if you’re looking to buy a place. To me, parity between rent and mortgage payments would swing the equation towards renting in SKC. The renter can leave and probably get their deposit back, whereas the owner get stuck paying a mortgage along with excise taxes and broker fees when they decide to leave.

RE:Jonness @ 4 –
I’m pleasantly surprised to see this progressive thinking coming from you. I did have you pinned as someone stuck in the old mentality based on some of your previous comments. Good job changing your approach to adapt to change. This is a sign of intelligence.

If you had me pinned as that, you must not have read many of my posts. And for the record, I have not changed anything about my outlook. It’s the same as I’ve been posting on here for the last 5 years.

I guess that means I can’t adapt to change and have thus flunked your IQ test. Good thing I still have the Stanford-Binet.

Reminds me of what the Japanese auto manufacturers do with safety recalls, delay ’em forever and when cornered, lie about ’em, RE: blame the floor mats and gas petals for stuck 2500+ RPM idles, IMO clearly caused by a faulty computer and broke acceleration module [both]. Albeit after about 100K miles of use.

Japanese safety recalls foreclosures by Big Banks:

“…What is the only thing better than Foreclosure Stuffing to provide an artificial supply-side subsidy to the housing market? How about completely clogging the foreclosure pipeline, by halting all foreclosure sales, which is just what the three TBTF megabanks: Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and Citi have done in recent weeks. Under the guise of ‘ensuring late-stage foreclosure procedures were in accordance with guidelines’…”

In my S King area the empty foreclosed units sit empty for years….God forbid we put ’em all on the market at once. There’s even a new “half-built’ new home on 132nd, near Kent Kangley in an abandenned building lot HOA for about a year….ran out of money?

RE:David Losh @ 21 – “The best thing about this blog is the lack of moderation ”

No disagreement. What I’m after w/ Greasemonkey is the ability on my end (from my browser) to do filtering. Patrick.net (and others) give you (as the reader) the ability to ignore comments from certain users.

I’m not a web programmer, so I don’t know how to do it, just a vague idea that it can be done.